Eyeing the future, young NASA engineers get their hands on legendary Saturn V engine (updated)

A Saturn V F-1 engine, originally stored at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington arrives at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The engine's pristine condition made its components ideal for refurbishment and testing. Andrew Hanks, a Marshall engineer with the Safety and Mission Assurance Office, collaborated with the team to arrange for the engineÃ¢ÂÂs safe transportation to the Marshall Center Propulsion Research Development Laboratory in July 2012. (NASA/MSFC photo)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- The Saturn V F-1 engine is the most powerful American rocket engine ever built and the cornerstone of this Alabama city's reputation as America's "rocket city." Some Huntsvillians still remember its test-firings shaking the ground for miles during the early Apollo era.

Now, a new generation of NASA engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center is taking apart, refurbishing and testing parts of leftover F-1s to learn their lessons for future big American rockets. Test firings of an F-1 gas generator have been under way on Redstone Arsenal for a week and, while they aren't shaking the ground the way the full engines did back in the day, they are teaching engineers who weren't born in the Apollo era more about what it takes to get to deep space.

"Being able to hold the parts of this massive engine that once took us to the moon, restoring it, and then seeing it come back to life through hot firings and test data has been an amazing experience," Marshall liquid propulsion systems engineer Kate Estes said in a NASA report on the test program.

Marshall is the NASA center leading development of a new rocket more powerful than the Saturn V and capable of lifting the weight required to get astronauts and all of their life support equipment into deep space and back again. No rocket in the world today can do that, although nations like China and commercial companies such as SpaceX are developing ones that might.

NASA actually has a few F-1s left over from the abrupt cancellation of the Apollo program in the 1970s. One of them was stored at Marshall, and one of them was stored at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington in what NASA calls "almost pristine condition."

The team of young Marshall engineers, trained in in everything from propulsion to materials science, recently took apart and refurbished the gas generator of an F-1. That's the part that supplies power to the F-1's legendary turbopumps. Those pumps could slam almost three tons of liquid oxygen and refined liquid kerosene into the engine's thrust chamber per second, creating what engineers still call the F-1's "incredible 1.5 million pounds of thrust."

The knowledge flow goes both ways on this historical timeline. Today's engineers learn more about a fuel mixture modern engineers don't have a lot of experience with, and they apply modern research techniques to parts built a generation ago. One of those techniques was a 3-D scan that led to three-dimensional design drawings of F-1 parts.

"Modern instrumentation, testing and analysis improvements learned over
40 years, and digital scanning and imagery techniques are allowing us to
obtain baseline data on performance and combustion stability," Marshall
engineer Nick Case says. "We are even gathering data not collected when
the engine was tested originally in the 1960s."

On Jan. 10, 2013, the Saturn V F-1 gas generator completed a 20-second hot-fire test. Engineers are completing a series of tests at Test Stand 116 located in the East Test Area at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. (NASA photo)

The techniques allowed NASA to determine "how some parts of the engine might be more affordably manufactured using modern techniques, such as additive manufacturing," Estes said. Modernized versions of the F-1 may have a role in powering the new heavy-lift rocket, some engineers believe. Dynetics, a Huntsville company, has a NASA contract to test upgrades that might lead to using new F-1s on rockets to Mars and other deep-space destinations. NASA is also making its findings available to other companies that can benefit from them.

This month, "hot fire tests" are under way at Test Stand 116 in Marshall's East Test Area. "We decided that using modern instrumentation to measure the gas
generator's performance would provide beneficial information for NASA
and industry," Estes said.

It's only a single kerosene gas generator on the stand, but today's engineers still blink at the power it can produce: 31,000 pounds of force, to be exact. When tests finally begin on larger, modernized F-1 components, they will take place at NASA's Stennis Test Center in south Mississippi.

(This story was updated Jan. 15 at 2:30 p.m. CST to add an additional photograph)